History

Top football prospect / unknown soccer player chooses soccer

Drake Davis is a sudden celebrity within the soccer Twittersphere. The high school junior and four-star football recruit with scholarship offers from major programs like Alabama and Florida State apparently wants to play soccer instead.

So is this the Day of Much Rejoicing, in which the USA gets a big-time soccer player to give up a football career for soccer stardom? Top Drawer Soccer’s J.R. Eskilson has the reality check:

Davis is a mystery in college soccer recruiting. There is hardly any mention of him from the prep scene.

I’m glad TDS couldn’t find much on him, because I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me.

And now that Davis has left his Louisiana home and transferred to Fork Union Military Academy in rural Virginia, what sort of club soccer can he play?

So in the era of Development Academy and other ultraserious clubs accounting for the bulk of college prospects, can a great athlete (I think we can assume that from his football credentials) make it in soccer without such developmental advantages? Will he get a full scholarship offer from the limited money college soccer programs can spread out among recruits?

It’s hard to see this as any sort of tipping point for U.S. national programs. If you’re nowhere to be seen in the national scene as a junior, the odds of being the next Oguchi Onyewu (Deadspin says Altidore, but he’s listed as a “striker/sweeper,” and there’s more demand for players on the backline) are quite small.